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As marajuana, medical and otherwise, becomes legalized in states, pot appears to be growing vertical market.

DirectView Holdings, on Oct. 6 announced it landed a $150,000 contract to complete a "comprehensive security and surveillance installation" at a Colorado marajuana facility, which includes a large grow house, two dispensaries and management offices. The announcement said the installation will be complete by the end of the year. Here's some background on DirectView.

The installation will include "DirectView IP megapixel security cameras, DirectView's NVR video and audio storage server as well as a access controls and a comprehensive intrusion alarm system."

In a prepared statement, Roger Ralston, CEO and chairman of DirectView, said this is "another cannabis installation [won as the result of its] exclusive security partnership with [a design and build firm for marajuana facilities] Cannamor. We continue to solidify our position as a trusted source for the security needs of the cannabis industry enabling us to win larger installation contracts like this one. We are also beginning to gain traction in ongoing alarm monitoring services which can provide and important source of future recurring revenue. The cannabis industry continues to grow and we intend to work diligently to build on our momentum in Colorado and other geographic regions in the country."

Bold Technologies has launched its new cloud-based automation platform, Manitou Cloud Services, and is working to add 30,000 accounts to it by the end of the year, Rod Coles, Bold’s president and CEO, told Security Systems News.

Designing the service to be UL compliant was the company's top priority, Coles said, and it is currently in the process of attaining that certification.

Coles said the release of Manitou Cloud Services was sooner than he expected and credited a rise in consumers’ confidence in cloud-based systems. “Hosted solutions seem to have a better reliability than individual service because they have so much redundancy.”

“The first installations will be on our existing Manitou platform,” Coles said, but the cloud automation will also be ready to use Manitou Neo, the next version of Bold’s central station automation, to be released in 2016. Coles estimated its release to be around ISC West 2016.

Bold first talked about the service at its annual Users’ Group Conference in early August, Coles said, and now has a couple of clients transitioning.

Bold has experience with hosted services, according to Coles, through similarities with the company’s disaster recovery center—a separate cloud-based center that Bold has been offering for years.

The cloud center will be based in Colorado Springs, Bold’s hometown, because of the area’s small risk for natural disasters and its location between both coasts, the company said.

Manitou Cloud Services can make operations easier for Bold users, according to Coles. “We’re getting to the stage now where people [have] to replace their hardware, every few years. They're also having to employ staff to look databases, to look after operating systems to make sure that these things are running 24/7. All of these [issues] go away when you have a hosted solutions.”

Icontrol Networks says it has won its patent fight with Alarm.com. Alarm.com says the solution to the "fight" was the result of a settlement with icontrol dated Jan. 1, 2014.

In the latest activity, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office this month canceled claims to Alarm.com’s claims to a patent about the use of a mobile app in smart home systems, saying the system was developed instead by icontrol.

Icontrol has been issued a new patent, covering methods and systems for interacting and synchronizing with home security and automation systems using mobile applications, according to icontrol.

“Recognition of icontrol as the inventor of this key mobile application technology for home control is a testament to the strength of our intellectual property, “ Richard Mosher, icontol’s general counsel, said in a prepared statement. “Early investments in developing our intellectual property portfolio have resulted in some of the earliest patent awards for cloud- and mobile-connected home solutions.”

The new icontol patent defines the mechanisms needed to deliver a mobile application that synchronizes with a premise security system, presents security system state information to the user and enables the user to in some way control the system.

“We focused on delivering home automation and remote control for mobile and cloud long before they were technology buzzwords, and we’re happy to see the USPTO recognizes our early leadership,” Bob Hagerty, icontrol CEO said in the statement.

Icontrol, contacted by Security Systems News, declined to comment further on the ruling beyond its prepared statement.

Alarm.com announced in 2014 that it had and settled and dismissed all patent infringement lawsuits between the two companies, including litigation involving Telular Corp. and FrontPoint Security.

"As part of the agreement, Alarm.com and iControl each retain all ownership and rights to their respective patents and have also expanded their respective portfolios of licensed intellectual property via certain cross-licensing agreements. The patents included in the cross-license agreement represent some of the earliest, seminal intellectual property for Connected Home technology today. The respective CEOs of each company commented that they were pleased to reach resolution around these serious intellectual property matters and each company is looking forward to refocusing on its customer’s deployments," Alarm.com said in the prepared statement.

Fire Monitoring of Canada has been working to increase awareness of its offerings outside of fire monitoring, Kevin Allison, GM for FMC told me.

“Obviously, we do installations of fire alarm monitoring, sprinkler monitoring—those are our primary focus, in terms of what we do,” he said, “But we also do—and the thing people might not know about us just given the [company’s] name—typical security installations and monitoring, CCTV, both IP and analog [services], access control, card access … nurse call systems.”

“Our name says fire monitoring, which is great from that perspective, because it is primarily what we do,” said Allison, but the company excels in many other areas as well, he added. At the same time, the company wants to maintain its core business in fire monitoring, Allison said.

Increasing awareness of FMC’s full service abilities will be an ongoing initiative for the company over the next 12 to 14 months, he said. The company gets its message out through radio and digital advertising, he said.

The company first increased awareness efforts about a year ago and the proportion of business other than fire and monitoring has increased, he said. Currently, about 70 to 75 percent of FMC’s business is fire and monitoring focused; about a year ago it was closer to 80 percent.

Allison said that much of FMC’s business is with buildings required by code to be monitored. FMC’s monitoring center is ULC-listed, CSAA Five Diamond, and based in St. Catherines, Ontario.

Spoke to Wayne Arvidson at Quantum, a 35-year-old storage technology company that specializes in handling unstructured data like video. Quantum's presence in the physical security space is growing, he said.

I saw a demo of Honeywell's MAXPRO Cloud by Michael Coniff. MAXPRO Cloud is another products that's aimed directly at the SMB market.

At Verint, I spoke to Kevin Wine about enhancements to Verint's Situational Awareness Platform: Dispatch Manager, Mobile Reporter and Mobile Responder. There is big interest from end users who like that the mobile enhancements are app-based, DeWine said.

At MicroPower Technologies I spoke to Dave Tynan about the new SOLVEIL camera. Tynan said there's growing acceptance of the company's solar, wireless cameras.

My last #ASIS15 visit gets my vote for coolest product: Iscon Imaging is an IR scanner for people. It uses thermal technology to scan a person (like at the airport). The cool thing is that it has benefits that other scanners don't have and it doesn't have the problems that other scanners have. It can't see through clothing, but it can detect objects made of any material, not just metal. And, it doesn't emit millimeter waves or radiation. "The only thing that comes out of the camera is warm air," said Iscon CEO Bill Gately. The warm air makes objects visible in the IR image. This scanner does not provoke privacy and health concerns and it's better at detecting objects of all kinds, Gately said. The product is available in two forms: as a walk-through scanner and there's also a hand-held version. The product has a time-and-date stamp, it can take screenshots, and it has a USB port so images can be downloaded easily. And, it's ripe for integration with other security system components, Gately said. This was the first security trade show for Iscon.

Tuesday, Sept. 29, Day 2 at ASIS 2015

I began Day 2 at the Oncam breakfast, which was off of the showfloor at the Hilton. Jumbi Edulbehram, who joined Oncam as head of the Americas in March, gave an overview and demo of Oncam's 360-degree technology. At the show, Oncam is showing off its Evolution-12 cameras (12-megapixel $K Exmor R sensor to deliver 9.6 MP high-resolution image). Joining Edulbehram were Eddy Collier, director of surveillance technology and corporate surveillance at MGM Resorts, Ted Whiting, director of surveillance MGM Resorts International, and Darryl Daniel, Sr. Consultant, Houston Airport Systems. The end users discussed of how 360-degree cameras are used in the airport and gaming industry to watch what's going on at the tables and slot machines and how the cameras are used for customer service. "360" is a verb at MGM, Whiting said. "We 360 you, [to return lost property, for example]," Whiting said.

Whiting used the example of money falling out of someone's pocket at a slot machine. The surveillance staff may notice that, retrieve the money, use Oncam equipment "to 360" the customer who lost the money and return the money to that customer. Much of the time, the security staff returns items before the customer even knows they've lost something. Collier said a PTZ camera in a casino "may be used three times a month, but a 360-degree camera is used for situational awareness 100 percent of the time."

On the showfloor, I caught up with Keith Jentoft of Videofied. You did not need to locate a booth to see Videofied's newest outdoor battery-powered camera, Jentoft was walking the aisles, camera in hand, doing demos on-the-go.

I met with George DeMarco, ESX chairman, to talk about technology trends and ESX 2016, which will take place in Dallas June 8-10.

At Assa Abloy, Peter Boroskin said all of the company's main locks lines for commercial and institutional applications now support mobile devices. Assa Abloy's first mobile device-enabled lock was in 2011. Sustainability is an ongoing theme for Assa Abloy, which is developing energy-efficient locks. Its Eco-Flex technology, works "like a hybrid car" he said, it uses a battery for 23 hours a day and then for one hour it's connected to a power source to charge the battery. "It's 98 percent more efficient [than a wired connection]," Boroskin said. He also said the POE is growing faster in the company's portfolio than Wi-Fi. "Why? Because it's easier to route," he said. Assa Abloy is also showing new solutions for multi-family buildings.

I ran into Benjamin Butchco who is doing an educational session today called "The Great PSIM debate." Don't miss it! It's at 1:45 p.m. today (Wednesday, Sept. 30) in room 202B. The genesis of this session was TechSec2015. It was a dynamic debate that day, and I'm sure it will be a great discussion today as well.

I had a chance to meet with the folks at IDIS, a newcomer but not a newcomer. IDIS made its debut at ISC West this year, but it's actually been in business for along time OEMing products to many other companies. I met with Keith Drummond, Andrew Myung, Benjamin Bryant and Peter Kim. Bryant told me that IDIS's goals for the show are "awareness of the brand, awareness that we have a 20-year history in the industry, and awareness of our commitment to innovation."

I had a chance to interview Jim Cannon, president of Stanley Security. Cannon talked about his vision for the security division in its current post-acquisition chapter. It's focusing on its vertical market strategy, having made good progress in the healthcare and retail verticals in particular, he said. Cannon talked about "Stanley Insights," Stanley's efforts on harnessing data, "the raw material of our time" to turn it into information for Stanley customers. He also talked about "Stanley Standards," an initiative to ensure that installation technicians, service technicians and monitoring staff all of Stanley's 61 branches are highly trained. Finally, we talked about Stanley's goal to hire more veterans. "I want one-third of our future recruits to come from the military," he said. Look for a longer story on this interview next week.

I left the show floor at 4 p.m. to board a bus to Irvine for the grand opening of the new Irvine Axis Experience Center. In 2014, Axis announced plans to expand its presence in North America with more local resources and brick-and-mortar presence. I've been to the Experience Centers in Lund, Sweden and Chelmsford, Mass. While they're nice facilities, this new one in Irvine stands out for its creative but practical design. It's sited in an office park, but it doesn't feel like an office park. The center has floor-to-ceiling glass walls and a reflecting pool that surrounds the building. Beyond the pool is green space and palm trees.

The office has a large training room, where Axis can do hands-on training at 28 desk stations. It can be used as a meeting room for many more people. Fredrik Nilsson, Axis GM Americas, said the center is open to the industry to be used by associations and also by Axis customers. The center features a product display wall that is designed to be able to swap out products. The center also features vertical market-themed displays, which are cleverly fitted into a small area. There's a Gaming Area with a BlackJack table and a slot machine (Bill Wendlandt, West Business Area Manager for Axis, had to find a slot machine that was more than 20 years old, for legal reasons.) The slot machine works, but with Axis "chips." A Transaction Area, recreates a bank teller-type scenario. A short wall on near the transaction area houses an Axis Access Control solution. Wendlant wanted the access control devices to be visible, so the entire wall is glass. Why is there a plastic water bottle at the bottom of the wall? It's a tribute to the contractors who left a trail of water bottles in their wake, Wendlandt said. There's also a Retail Area, an Airport waiting area which looks out in the direction of John Wayne Airport, so you can see planes taking off and landing. (Talk about thoughtful design.) There's an Educational Vertical area that also serves as a kitchen/pantry for the office. It can also double as a restaurant or bar, and that's how it was set up at the grand opening. We saw the server room and engineering lab/testing lab. I've seen lots of testing labs, but I don't think I've ever seen one with windows. This seems like a pretty nice place to test products. There's a large conference room and a large the sales office. One side with cubicles has a giant glass wall; the other side has a giant photo of Fenway Park, to recognize the home office in Massachusetts. Axis plans to open an Experience Centers in Canada and Mexico and two more in the U.S. in the near future.

Monday, Sept. 28, Day 1 at ASIS 2015

After traveling all day Sunday from Maine to Anaheim, Calif., my ASIS show experience began at 3 in the afternoon with more transportation: a one-hour van ride to Paramount Picture Studios to check out the new GSOC and SureView System' Immix platform. SureView's Scott Haugland, Rob Hile and Tom Bradley gave an overview and a large contingent from the Paramount security team was on hand to lead the tour and answer questions including Louis Lam, executive director of security services, Roy Condon SVP Environmental Health, Safety and Security, and Jeff Reider senior analytis business resiliency. Rob Hile started the presentation saying, "You're about to see a PSIM that works." Hile has spoken about PSIM a lot at industry events including at TechSec this year. SureView was able to deploy this system within three months of talking to Paramount, and Lam said that total ROI will be achieved in three years. SureView's Graham Johnson spoke to me about the importance of rapid deployment at ISC West this year. SureView continues to work with the security team at Paramount to refine and improve features of the system. Hile emphasized that it's "not customized, but it's specialized." He said that integrations SureView has added to the Paramount PSIM—with graphics specifically—are benefitting all SureView customers. Asked how the security department works with its IT department, Lam said all IP products—security and otherwise—run on one network. So the IT department owns everything. "They buy it, they own it. We tell them what [security systems] to buy and we house all the data in our data center." I'll have more on this later, but it was a great tour and very interesting to attend the event with some specifiers including Bill Jacobs, who asked some pointed questions. Here's an interview with Bill that I did this summer.

Last year at ASIS, Protection 1 talked about its recent Cisco Cloud and Managed Services Express Partner Certification. This year, Haenggi talked about how the company's managed services is evolving to enhance the user experience. For example, managed services features can give a retailer or coffee shop information that enables them to enhance the experience for their customers. Now managed services can provide "ease of use" for the end users' customers, Haenggi said. Protection 1 announced "a milestone it the design, implementation and monitoring of security-only networsk. ... it now has "more than 1,000 network devices under management across 750 networks, representing 18 customer logos."

I also got a look at Protection 1's newest eSuite 2.0 which has new features for mobile devices.

Some big news today from Lenel and AlertEnterprise. I spoke to Lenel's Ron Virden and AlertEnterprise's Jasvir Gill. They've signed a strategic alliance deal, finalized on Monday infact, so Lenel dealers can resell AlertEnterprise’s Physical Identity and Access Management (PIAM) software to support an advanced PIAM and compliance solution. Look for a full story in our newswire this week. The integration enables some cool stuff for the two companies' Fortune 100 company customers, and they're viewing this as a big opportunity for their integrator partners as well.

Stopped by the Genetec booth and spoke to Kevin G. Clark, Andrew Elvish, Jimmy Palatsoukas and Francis LaChance about Genetec's focus on the "security of security" which involves encryption and privacy in its Security Center 5.4. I also met with Genetec technology partner Evgenia Ostrovskaya of KiwiSecurity and saw how their software will pixilate a video (streaming or otherwise) so that only authorized viewers can see non-pixilated video. Its a privacy technology that's commonplace in Europe and becoming more in demand in North America, Elvish said, as privacy concerns are raised in certain video surveillance applications such as city surveillance.

I spoke briefly with Courtney Mamuscia about expanded focus for fraud, risk and compliance Solutions and for security intelligence for the education vertical. Verint is also organizing its very first customer conference, which will take place in late June in Chicago. Briefcam

I stopped by SRI and spoke to Mark Clifton about two ASIS accolade award winning products, an iris biometric embedded terminal for access control. It's ideal for access control in a warehouse, he said. I also saw their iris biometric door lock for residential applications. It's battery operated, but you hit a button to turn the batter on whenever you want to open a door.

At the Milestone booth, I met with Jeff Simpson and Cheryl Bartley of Lentix, a Milestone partner showing camera-agnostic light correction. The cameras do not need to be high end, and the product became commercially available as of Monday.

I also stopped by BriefCam to talk to Rachel Nieman. She showed me some work that BriefCam is doing on the visual presentation of data. The company can filter video by color, size, speed of object, etc and it's working on ways to present that data, for security and non-security information. Cool stuff.

I met Jeffrey He and Alex Asnovich of Hikvision for the first time at a reception Monday afternoon.

ASIS is next week. I'll be heading to Anaheim, Calif. this weekend because, of course, the show begins before the show begins.

Among my first events is a Sunday afternoon tour of Paramount Studios to check out their Sureview System.

I'll be at the show all three days, Sept. 28-Sept. 30 and I am looking forward to getting some exercise on the floor running from one meeting to another.

I do have a couple of open times--like 30 minutes each day on Monday, Tues. and Wednesday. I reserved them for compelling last-minute invites. If you've got something really cool that you think my readers--the integrators--will really care about, let me know what it is and why my readers need to know too via email by EOD Thursday. Thank you!

New Orleans is looking at outsourcing its false alarm fine management and collections to CryWolf False Alarm Solution from Maryland-based Public Safety Corp, according to a report from The Times – Picayune for Greater New Orleans.

When talking with Martin he said it was a great practice, one that SIAC recommends.

Martin said that increased collection efforts, through automating or outsourcing the process, can have a positive effect on reducing false alarms. Properly administrated fines provide offenders with an incentive to change their behavior.

I greatly look forward to following up with Public Safety Corp. about CryWolf and how it can help a city with false alarm management. CryWolf has worked with cities such as Atlanta, Los Angeles and Sante Fe, N.M., according to its site.

BOSTON— Battery Ventures today closed the NICE physical security business unit deal and announced that the new independent business will be called Qognify.

Battery Ventures announced its intention to acquire the business for "up to $100 million" in August. Here's a story on that announcement. Today's announcement did not include details on the final price.

Feldman said that Battery plans to continue to invest in the PSBU and expand into other market segments. In addition to possibly adding access control capabilities, Feldman said that Battery would consider acquiring analytics capabilities, video and otherwise. NICE's customers include banks, utility companies, airports, seaports, city centers and transportation systems and sports venues.

Michael Barnes, founder of Barnes Associates Inc., the consulting and advisory firm that specializes in the security alarm industry, provided SSN with interesting insights about the non-traditional deal, noting that GHS had recently reached a milestone $500,000 in RMR.

Here’s what he told SSN:

“GHS is a very interesting company. Steve Baker and Topspin Partners were looking for an opportunity in the industry and liked the idea of buying a sales and installation engine and building a full-service company around that, as opposed to buying an existing integrated alarm company. We [Barnes Associates] had sold an ADT dealer the year before and knew there was real value in companies that have the account origination capability … but no RMR.

“This is not the normal path by which private equity invests in the industry. Typically, they seek out fully operating companies that have a material customer base and RMR that can be leveraged, Day One. At market prices for these companies, however, most investors can’t get the returns they are looking for without substantial growth after the initial acquisition.

“Steve Baker and Topspin Partners recognized that buying a highly capable originating company, and then building up the operations around this capability and the RMR they could generate afforded the chance to grow a large successful company using a better cost dynamic. Rather than buying a fully functioning, integrated alarm company and then taking the risk associated with developing additional growth capability at a low cost, they bought the growth engine and took the risk that they could build a functioning full-service company around it.

“Basically, this is following the path Vivint took, where they first developed a material account origination capability and then started to keep the accounts and build up the necessary infrastructure to own and service them.

“Steve Baker knew the perfect company to acquire—LifeLine Security. The company was founded and owned by Gordon Johnson and John Fox, who had perfected the year-round door-to-door sales model (as opposed to the “summer sales” model), in several California markets. They were generating almost $200,000 a year of new RMR under a dealer program and were looking for a way to change their model to one that would build a fully integrated company.

“Gordon and John also had experience earlier in their careers in other parts of the Southwest, and had the proven capability to expand into new markets. This meshed with Steve Baker’s vision to broaden geographically into Texas, Arizona and Nevada in order to have a more diversified footprint and a larger overall market opportunity.”

“Starting with no accounts in mid-2013, when GHS acquired LifeLine, they have grown to over $500,000 of RMR.

“This rapid growth requires capital, and we have enjoyed working with the GHS team to develop the best approach to satisfying this need. We identified Topspin Partners as the best fit for the equity, given their highly successful prior play in the industry and their appreciation for the opportunity. The debt part of the capital structure was a challenge, however, as the company needed a lender that could start small, Day One, and grow rapidly with the company. Most of the lenders that truly understand the industry dynamic typically require the full servicing infrastructure to be in place and proven, and a seasoned existing account base. Neither of these were present with GHS. Additionally, most of the industry lenders had minimum initial borrowing amounts well above GHS’s initial need. We found a division of Barclays that provided the initial facility.

“Fortuitously, Brent Humphries and Patrick Fear had left Barclays and moved to Alliance Bernstein to head up a very large non-bank debt fund, AB Private Credit Investors. Brent and Patrick were instrumental in setting up the initial facility and were intimately familiar with the company. We conducted a relatively broad placement process, and they quickly distinguished themselves by proposing a highly flexible package of debt capital that met every one of GHS’s needs, along with highly competitive pricing and an ability to cycle through the approval and closing process quickly. Since they are not a bank, they brought an inherent flexibility that was attractive. They are truly a capital partner, rather than a “lender” in the traditional sense.

“AB was great to work with. Not only are they perfect for GHS, but I know they have the appetite to do more in the industry.”

MELVILLE, N.Y.—Honeywell is making changes. Yesterday, the company made an internal announcement that it’s combining its security and fire businesses into one new business, Honeywell Security and Fire (HSF).

HSF will be a business unit within Honeywell Automation & Control Solutions (ACS) division.

Paja will report to Alex Ismail, president and CEO of ACS. Before being named president of Honeywell Security Group in January, Paja was VP and GM for Honeywell Transportation Systems in China and India.

Gary Lederer, president of the legacy Honeywell Fire Safety business, will lead the integration of the businesses until 2016, when he will retire. Lederer has been with Honeywell for 16 years and in the life safety business for 27 years.

The Honeywell sales teams in the legacy HSG and HFS businesses will remain in place.

A Honeywell internal announcement said: “The company remains committed to supporting its customers with the same level of reliable and quality products, service and delivery throughout this process, with a focus on transparency and open communication.”

It also said that “the combination of the two businesses offers a broader and more robust portfolio of best-in-class products and end-to-end connected solutions for Homes and Buildings.”